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Experts fear an “explosive increase” in Ebola cases after an outbreak in Congo entered a “new phase” and spread from the countryside to a city.

The BBC reports that Health Minister Oly Ilunga Kalenga confirmed a case in Mbandaka, a city of a million people about 130km (80 miles) from the area where the first cases were confirmed earlier this month.

The city is a major transportation hub with routes to the capital Kinshasa.

Forty-four people have been infected and 23 people are known to have died.

Senior World Health Organization (WHO) official Peter Salama said the spread to Mbandaka meant there was the potential for an “explosive increase” in cases.

“This is a major development in the outbreak,” he told the BBC. “We have urban Ebola, which is a very different animal from rural Ebola. The potential for an explosive increase in cases is now there.”

Mr Salama, the WHO’s deputy director-general for emergency preparedness and response, said Mbandaka’s location on the Congo river, widely used for transportation, raised the prospect of Ebola spreading to surrounding countries such as Congo-Brazzaville and the Central African Republic as well as downstream to Kinshasa, a city of 10 million people.

“This puts a whole different lens on this outbreak and gives us increased urgency to move very quickly into Mbandaka to stop this new first sign of transmission,” he said.

The BBC adds that the WHO said it was not recommending any trade or travel restrictions either within DR Congo, for example between Mbandaka and Kinshasa, or internationally.

But Mr Salama said that 13 countries in the region were boosting border screening measures and said DR Congo itself was increasing exit screening measures.

“The good news is that the DR Congo population is very used to Ebola outbreaks,” he added.

“They know to protect themselves by avoiding mass gatherings and mass funerals. They know as well that traditional healers can amplify the outbreak.”

As The Daily Mail notes, it is the ninth time Ebola has been recorded in Congo since the disease made its first known appearance near its northern Ebola river in the 1970s.

Ebola is most feared for the internal and external bleeding it can cause in victims owing to damage done to blood vessels.

The Mail reports that health workers have recorded confirmed, probable and suspected cases of Ebola in three health zones of Congo’s Equateur province, and have identified 432 people who may have had contact with the disease, the WHO said.

Supplies sent to Congo included more than 300 body bags for safe burials in affected communities. The vaccine will be reserved for people suspected of coming into contact with the disease, as well as health workers.

The vaccine requires storage at a temperature between -60 and -80 degrees C, tricky in a country with unreliable electricity.

“We are now tracing more than 4,000 contacts of patients and they have spread out all over the region of northwest Congo, so they have to be followed up and the only way to reach them is motorcycles,” Salama said. 

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Authored by Simon Black via Sovereign Man,

Read #1- Debt here…

Last week, the financial services giant Northwestern Mutual released new data showing that 1 in 3 Americans has less than $5,000 in retirement savings.

It’s an unfortunately familiar story. And Northwestern Mutual’s data is entirely aligned with other research we’ve seen in the past, including our own.

The Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances, for example, shows that the median bank balance among US consumers is just $2,900.

And Bank of America’s annual report from last year showed that the average balance per HOUSEHOLD (i.e. -not- per person) was $12,870… which was actually LESS than the average account balance that Bank of America reported in 1997!

On average, the typical US household has less savings today than they did 20 years ago… and almost nothing put away for retirement.

In fact 21% of Americans (based on Northwestern Mutual’s data) have absolutely nothing saved for retirement.

And 33% of Baby Boomers, the generation closest to retirement, have between $0 and $25,000 saved for retirement.

That’s hardly enough savings to last more than a few years… and a major reason why most retirees currently rely on Social Security to meet their monthly living expenses.

According to a Gallup poll from last May, 58% of US retirees said that they rely on Social Security as their major source of income. They simply don’t have enough of their own personal savings stashed away.

But as we’ve discussed many times before, Social Security is rapidly running out of money.

The most recent report from Social Security’s Board of Trustees (which includes the US Secretaries of the Treasury, Labor, and Health & Human Services) tells us that the program’s cost has exceeded its tax revenue since 2010.

Last year this shortfall was $59 billion, 11% worse than in 2016.

And in order to make up the difference and cover this deficit, Social Security has to dip into its trust fund, effectively burning through the program’s savings.

The problem with this approach is that, eventually, these annual deficits will burn through ALL of the program’s savings.

The government knows this; the Board of Trustees even state this in their annual report, projecting that the Social Security trust funds will become fully depleted in 2034.

Sixteen years may seem like a long way off. But we’re talking about retirement here. You’re supposed to think long-term about retirement. And the math simply doesn’t add up.

The Trustee Report states explicitly that, once the trust funds run out of cash, the program will have to, at a minimum, reduce the monthly benefit that’s paid to its recipients.

So if you’re planning on being retired at any point past 2034, the government is LITERALLY TELLING YOU that they won’t be able to pay the retirement benefit that’s been promised to you.

Longer term (pay attention to this if you’re under 40), the numbers get even worse.

The way Social Security works is that retiree benefits are essentially paid for by people who are currently in the work force.

If you have a job, a portion of your paycheck each month goes to Social Security and ends up in the pockets of people who are currently retired.

In order for Social Security to function, there has to be a certain number of workers paying into the program for each retiree.

Social Security tracks this worker-to-retiree ratio VERY closely. The higher the ratio, the better.

In 1995, for example, there were 4.9 workers paying into the program for every retiree receiving benefits.

By 2020, Social Security projects the ratio will be down to 3.7 workers per retiree.

And by 2040, just 2.75.

That’s simply not enough workers.

Do the math– at 2.75 workers per retiree, you’d have to pay nearly 40% of your salary just in Social Security tax (i.e. NOT including Medicare, federal, or state income tax) to keep the program running.

It’s also noteworthy that, just this morning, the US government released data showing that the birthrate in the United States is at a 30-year low.

If you project this alarming trend forward by a few decades, you can see how the worker-to-retiree ratio could easily fall below Social Security’s already dismal forecast.

It’s not just Social Security either. State and local pension funds, and even a lot of union and corporate pension funds, are also terminally insolvent.

A report issued a few months ago by the American Legislative Exchange Council estimates that the total amount of unfunded liabilities for state and local government pensions now exceeds $6 TRILLION.

Bottom line, Social Security is broken. State and local pensions are broken. And the federal government is far too broke to be able to bail any of them out.

Even the Social Security trustees admit this– they’re practically giving us a date to circle on our calendars for when the program will run out of money.

Yet a disturbing number of Americans has little to nothing set aside for retirement… and they’re expecting to be able to rely on Social Security.

Something is obviously wrong with this picture, and it would be utterly ludicrous to expect this won’t have a substantial impact.

Either future workers and businesses are going to be hammered with all sorts of new taxes to bail out Social Security–

— or retirees who have no savings and rely exclusively on the program to survive are going to have their benefits drastically slashed.

Either way, retirement is a nuclear problem set to explode in the Land of the Free.

One way or another, tens of millions of people are going to have their lives turned upside down.

And it is beyond the powers of the government to do anything to stop it.

And to continue learning how to ensure you thrive no matter what happens next in the world, I encourage you to download our free Perfect Plan B Guide.

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Yesterday morning, we highlighted a fascinating observations made first by Deutsche Bank, which showed just how much of an outlier the US yield curve has become relative to all other G10 nations: “The US 5y yield is now higher than any available 10y yield in other G10 countries.“

The US 5y yield is now higher than any available 10y yield in other G10 countries: DB

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 16, 2018

The full observation, originally made by Deutsche Bank’s macro strategist Alan Ruskin, was as follows:

In what is a very unusual experience, not only does the US have the highest 2y, 5y and 10y nominal and real yields in all of G10, but the US’s 5y yield is now higher than any available 10y yield in other G10 countries. Even the US’s nominal 3y yield (2.73%) is higher than all G10 countries’ 10y yields, except Australia’s 10y (2.82%).

Visually, this is shown by this sampling of G10 yield curves, in which the US is obviously the purple curve at the top:

Today Bloomberg had a similar take on this dramatic flattening of the yield curve, noting that while US 2Y TSYs offer nominally higher yields than 10Ys in Canada and Italy, US 3-Month Bills yield more than 60% of 10-Y yields across the DM space.

Needless to say, the flattening across the US curve has been astonishing.

For reference, another Deutsche Banker, Jim Reid, reminded us yesterday of the last time the 10Y was where it is now, at ~3.10%: for comparison’s sake, this was back in 2011 when 2yr yields were around 0.4% and 30yr yields were around 4.3% so as Reid puts it, “today’s level are a testament to how much flattening the curve has still seen in recent years as 10yrs have returned to the same level.”

Meanwhile, back in 2011 10yr Bunds were also around 3% while yesterday they did climbed 3.3bps to 0.641%, “so that continues to be one of the most crazy global financial markets” in Reid’s humble opinion.

The important point, according to Ruskin, is that “investors can take much more limited duration risk on US fixed income, to get the same yield as anywhere else in the G10 world.“

Duration risk, related to stretching out the yield curve, is seen as a particular issue in this cycle as Central Banks exit extreme accommodation. In the US, duration risk relates particularly to a few difficult to quantify factors, including: i) an unusually large expected increase in Treasury issuance (of nearly 3% of GDP between 2017 and 2019) related to both the Fed’s balance sheet reduction and the large fiscal expansion; and, ii) because the US Administration is attempting to put a stop to large official reserve buildups that are related to currency manipulation. These recycled official flows into US Treasuries, acted as ‘a bond put’ when the USD was weak.

And while the US yield curve is starting to move under the parameters of conventional economic forces such as treasury supply and demand, places like Europe and Japan are still toiling under an entirely different set of factors, namely central bank “jump risk” or concerns that central banks will no longer anchor the long end, causing another taper tantrum and/or VaR shock.

In the EUR area and Japan, the critical duration concerns relate to how aggressive Central Bank easing has severely distorted fundamental bond and credit value, and the uncertainties this fosters about ‘jump’ risk as and when they exit such distortionary policies. This exit risk particularly applies to Japan’s yield curve targeting regime.

Of course, anyone who has watched the yield curve and the USD recouple in the past month – literally, ever since the PBOC cut RRR on April 16 – will know that the sharp move in rates has been matched by a similar move in the dollar.  This has manifested itself by the sharp spike in short-end yields which have led to an effective pancaking of the US Treasury yield curve: here’s Ruskin:

In the past it has been remarked, how high US short-term rates and the flatness of the US yield curve has been a deterrent to hedged foreign flows into US Treasuries, most obviously from Japan.

The flip side of this is that as long as the expected USD exchange rate has shifted broadly neutral, US short-term yields are certainly high enough relative to a G10 peer group, to be extremely attractive without the need for investors to stretch out the curve and assume duration risk.

Ultimately, this boils down to a feedback loop whereby perceptions of a relatively stronger economy manifest in changes in the yield curve, which in turn leads to capital inflows, and a stronger dollar, are prompting the Fed to tighten further, creating expectations of even higher short-term rates, and even stronger inflows.

As per the above, the expected exchange rate is crucial to the US attracting unhedged bond flows that are then USD positive, and the compelling duration weighted yield advantage is one important factor tipping the scale in favor of self fulfilling positive USD expectations.

And while the feedback loop is quite effective on its own, especially with yields at other G10 economies frozen by QE or NIRP, the one catalyst that can breach it is a repricing of economic expectations. For now, the US is seen as the cleanest dirty shirt, especially after China’s easing on April 17 which launched the aggressive repricing higher of the dollar and 10Y yields (maybe it was Beijing’s warning shot in the ongoing Trump-Xi trade war?)

All that would take for the recent move to reverse violently, would be one or more economic indicators disappointing, or Fed heads suggesting that tightening in the US has gone on too far. Until that happens, however, keep buying that USD and cut duration on the curve: after all if the difference between 2Y and 10Y paper is just ~50bps, why not?

via RSS https://ift.tt/2LbIeXd Tyler Durden

Authored by Virginia Fidler via GoldTelegraph.com,

Socialist countries are quite adept at providing excuses for their inevitable failure.

As socialist Venezuela hits bottom, the latest culprit is oil. Let’s blame failing oil prices for all the misery. But once prosperous Venezuela has one of the world’s most abundant oil reserves. Ninety-five percent of Venezuela’s income is from oil sales.The country should be swimming in riches. Instead, its people are starving, scavenging desperately for food. The government has helpfully suggested that eating beloved pets might help the hunger problem.

Venezuela is in crisis. Many news sites point at falling oil prices as the reason. But oil prices have been rising since the fourth quarter of 2017, and Venezuela’s economy has only gotten worse. These higher prices should be a boom for Venezuela by creating greater revenues. Instead, its oil industry is in shambles and decline.

Thanks to Venezuela’s mismanagement of its major industries, massive debts and defaults on payments are at an all-time high. Halliburton has written off its $312 million investment in Venezuela, as have other companies. With inflation an annual inflation rate of 16,428%, and its oil output declining by 12 percent in just two months, Venezuela is plummeting into an unprecedented disaster of its own making.

Venezuela: 🇻🇪

– An annual inflation rate of 16,428%.
– prices doubling every 17.5 days
– Food shortage
– Medicine shortage
+ much more

As @steve_hanke says:

“Venezuela’s death spiral continues to spin”

which is extremely sad!

Retweet to raise awareness! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/Ra5o7SN9rk

— Gold Telegraph (@GoldTelegraph_) May 16, 2018

Falling oil prices are not the cause of Venezuela’s misery. It’s socialism. It’s the system whereby government owns the means of production. Historically, governments do a horrible job managing businesses. The Venezuelan government isn’t managing its industries on any level. It’s slowly destroying them. President Maduro has been unable to keep the oil industry running. There are no new investors because the government will confiscate any further exploration.

For any economy to thrive, production must meet consumer demand. The available goods must be affordable to potential buyers. Venezuelans need approximately $150 per month to purchase a dozen of eggs.The averagemonthly income is $2.20, with a tiny stipend of government welfare. Citizens cannot afford to buy what is needed to live comfortably and healthy. That’s socialism. No centrally-run government has ever been able to create and produce efficiently.

Many of Venezuela’s shortages have been created by price controls – another popular socialist tactic. When the government determines prices instead of market forces, prices become artificially low. This creates a greater demand for the product than the seller can deliver at any kind of a profit. The seller is losing money with each sale. The results are the empty Venezuelan supermarket shelves.

In the 1970s, the U.S. instituted price controls on gasoline. The result forced motorists to wait in long lines for hours to get whatever gasoline was available. Buyers at the end of the line frequently found that the gas was sold out once they reached the front of the line. Gas stations set limits on the amount of gasoline that could be purchased, forcing consumers to stand in line more frequently.

When the government controls what is being produced and how much, an invariable hierarchy develops, as it has in Venezuela. While the average Venezuelan citizen goes hungry, government employees eat just fine. Not to mention the military and the police. President Maduro needs to keep these factions happy to ensure their support. So, they get the major share of available goods while the remaining population goes without. This sham is possible only when the government controls the means of production and distribution of goods. It would be impossible in a free society.

In addition to shortages and hiking up prices beyond the means of the average Venezuelan, the country is experiencing extraordinary levels of hyperinflation. The cause of hyperinflation is always the uncontrolled, rapid printing of fiat currency. Venezuela’s annual inflation rate is 16,428%. According to Steve Hanke, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Venezuela’s inflation is exceeding 200 percent every month. It recalls the hyperinflation of post-WWI Germany when money was burned as heating material due to its low value. It was this hyperinflation that led to the election of one of the world’s darkest dictators – Hitler.

In Venezuela, President Maduro is showing similar despotic tendencies. He is allowing a large part of the population to starve to maintain his socialist principles. Starvation and misery have become government policies. There is no other explanation. The situation can only worsen. As people die from hunger, the labor force is reduced, thus reducing the number of available goods, even more, creating even greater catastrophic shortages.

All oil-producing nations have experienced falling oil prices. Only Venezuela is at the brink of an abyss from which it may never recover. Venezuela is sinking in a quagmire of socialist principles. Inefficiency, corruption, price controls, and out-of-control hyperinflation have created economic madness. Does President Maduro care? It’s hard to say. But he and his military minions are not starving, and they have guns. The population is bound to notice sooner or later. What happens when socialism encounters the forces of reality?

The world is watching this grim development, which undoubtedly will not have a happy ending.

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Warren Buffett famously called them “weapons of mass destruction,” and The Pope has damned the derivatives markets as a “ticking time bomb” warning of the “ethical void,”

“…which becomes more serious as these products are negotiated on the so-called markets with less regulation (over the counter) and are exposed more to the markets regulated by chance, if not by fraud, and thus take away vital life-lines and investments to the real economy.”

In a sweeping critique of global finance released by the Vatican on Thursday, that the Holy See singled out credit-default swaps for particular scorn.

“A ticking time bomb,” the Vatican called them.

“The market of CDS, in the wake of the economic crisis of 2007, was imposing enough to represent almost the equivalent of the GDP of the entire world. The spread of such a kind of contract without proper limits has encouraged the growth of a finance of chance, and of gambling on the failure of others, which is unacceptable from the ethical point of view.”

As Bloomberg’s Sridhar Natarajan reports,  the unusual rebuke – derivatives rarely reach the level of religious doctrine – is in keeping with Francis’s skeptical view of unbridled global capitalism.

The Holy See then put the sinning shadow bankers in his sights…

29.  It is no longer possible to ignore certain phenomena in the world, such as the spreading of the collateral banking systems (Shadow banking system). These, although well understood within themselves, and also the types of intermediaries whose functioning does not immediately appear disapproved, in fact have led to the loss of control over the system on the part of various authorities of national securities. Hence, they have knowingly favored the use of the so-called creative financing in which the primary aim of the investment of the financial resources is above all speculative in character, if not predatory, and not a service to the actual economy.  For instance, many agree that the existence of such “shadow” systems may be one of the contributing causes that advanced the development, and the global diffusion, of the recent economic-financial crisis started in the USA with subprime mortgages in the summer of 2007.   

Then Pope Francis took a shot at offshore tax havens…

30… Today, more than the half of the commercial world is orchestrated by noteworthy persons that cut down their tax burden by moving the revenues from one site to another according to their convenience, transferring the profits into fiscal havens, and the costs into the countries of higher taxation. It appears clear that all these have removed decisive resources from the actual economy and contributed to the creation of economic systems founded on inequality. Furthermore, it is not possible to ignore the fact that those offshore sites, on more occasions, have become usual places of recycling dirty money, which is the fruit of illicit income (thefts, frauds, corruption, criminal associations, mafia, war booties etc.). This represents, from the moral point of view, an evident form of hypocrisy.  

Who knew The Pope and his Vatican team were such experts in shadow banking, offshore tax havens, credit default swaps, gross collateral needs, and the entire derivatives market in general?

We have one simple question – which banker or ‘elite’ wrote this 11,000 word treatise on all that’s wrong with the world… in all its intricate detail that only an experienced banker would know?

Call us conspiracy geeks, but give The Pope’s Argentine heritage and the fact that Argentina’s CDS just exploded this week as its currency collapsed…

Is Argentina about to blame derivatives and speculators for its economic demise, and use The Pope’s derivative damnation to sell whetever their plan is to the 76.5% of the population that is Catholic?

 

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Authored by Nick Givas via The Daily Caller,

Florida circuit court Judge Raag Singhal ruled the Broward County Supervisor of Elections Office violated state and federal law Friday, after the office destroyed ballots from a 2016 House race for Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s seat.

The elections office may also be on the hook for $200,000 in attorneys fees for Tim Canova, who brought a lawsuit against them after he lost to Wasserman Schultz in 2016, the Sun Sentinel reported. Canova lost by a final tally of 28,809 to 21,907 in a Democratic primary.

Canova requested a closer look at the paper ballots from the race to check for anomalies in March 2017, but Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes did not respond to his requests so he took her to court, according to the Sun Sentinel. Snipes had signed off on the destruction of the ballots in September 2017.

Snipes made a “mistake,” she said during testimony in court and claimed the boxes were mislabeled. She maintained the destruction of the ballots was entirely unintentional.

“When I sign, I sign folders filled with information,” Snipes said in her testimony, according to the Sun Sentinel.

“I trust my staff. They have the responsibility of giving me information that’s correct.”

Singhal ruled Snipes had wrongly destroyed public records because her office is required to maintain documents from the election for 22 months after it’s conclusion. Snipes destroyed the ballots after only one year.

Snipes’ attorney, Burnadette Norris-Weeks, also admitted her client made a mistake but said the ballots were scanned and preserved before being disposed of.

“It was a mistake [destroying the original ballots], but the ballots were preserved,” Norris-Weeks told the Sun Sentinel.

“They were scanned shortly after the election.”

Canova claimed he contacted the FBI twice to complain, but didn’t receive a response.

The ruling will allow for Canova to have his attorney fees reimbursed by the elections office, but he still wants Snipes fired for her role in the alleged fraud.

“I think dismissal is an appropriate remedy,” Canova told the Sun Sentinel.

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller has handed over an unredacted memo to a Virginia judge on Thursday outlining the scope of his wide-ranging probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. There is just one problem: the memorandum, written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was filed under seal in the Eastern District of Virginia after judge T.S. Ellis, who is overseeing the case against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, excoriated a Special Counsel attorney two weeks ago during a “motion to dismiss” hearing.

In other words, virtually nobody can read the 3-page memo that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote on Aug. 2, 2017, explaining why Manafort was a target of the special counsel; although now that it is in the “public arena” we fully expect its contents to leak within days: after all, if this was a memo with any Trump-damaging information, it would have been leaked by “sources” inside the FBI and NSA long before it was even submitted to the court.

During a May 4 hearing in which Judge Ellis made the demand to see the full, unredacted memo, after DOJ attorney Michael Dreeben argued at the hearing that the redacted version offered the relevant paragraphs about Manafort, Ellis said: “I’ll be the judge of whether it relates to the others.”

Meanwhile, as twitter commentators suspect, the presence of the memo “will fuel calls by Trump allies on the hill to obtain the memo themselves.”

NEWS: The Special Counsel has filed under seal what is believed to be the unredacted memo detailing the scope of Mueller’s investigation.

Will almost certainly fuel (likely futile) calls by Trump allies on the hill to obtain the memo themselves: https://t.co/bidw0YjMHy pic.twitter.com/YoUYZL3kQz

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) May 17, 2018

A leaked transcript of a heated exchange between attorney Michael Dreeben and Eastern District of Virginia Judge T.S. Ellis revealed that the entire Manafort case was in jeopardy if the Special Counsel didn’t produce an unredacted copy of the original order from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein authorizing the original investigation.

Here, Judge Ellis is requesting the full August 2 Rosenstein memo.

Important Q: What if the memo proves right Judge Ellis’s suspicions about the SC being a means to impeachment? pic.twitter.com/Q7KgFODbyL

— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) May 5, 2018

Ellis also said that Mueller shouldn’t have “unfettered power” to prosecute Manafort for charges that have nothing to do with collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and called out the DOJ’s efforts in the case as an attempt by Mueller to gain leverage over Manafort.

“You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment or whatever. That’s what you’re really interested in.” –Judge Ellis

Ellis also noted that the Special Counsel’s indictment against Manafort doesn’t mention:

(1) Russian individuals
(2) Russian banks
(3) Russian money
(4) Russian payments to Manafort

To which Dreeben provided an unsatisfactory lawyerly response about how everything is connected to everything (including, apparently, whether Trump paid a woman to keep quiet about consensual sex). 

Ellis also gave prosecutors two weeks to show what evidence they have that Manafort was complicit in colluding with the Russians. 

Manafort faces two indictments by Mueller in Washington D.C. and Virginia, charging him with various crimes ranging from conspiring to launder money and failing to register as a foreign agent, to bank and tax fraud. 

Manafort’s lawyers had asked the judge in the Virginia case to dismiss an indictment filed against him in what was their third effort to beat back criminal charges by attacking Mueller’s authority. In addition to pushing back against the Special Counsel’s argument for why Manafort’s bank fraud charges are related to the Russia investigation, the judge also questioned why Manafort’s case could not be handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in Virginia, rather than the Special Counsel’s office, as it is not Russia-related. 

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Via ValueWalk.com,

Speak not because it is safe, but because it is right. So goes the ethos of Edward Snowden, the notorious NSA contractor who in 2013 leaked highly classified information detailing the government’s broad domestic and international surveillance powers.

fsHH / Pixabay

Where he was once seen as a traitor – or worse, a foreign spy – Snowden has become something of a pseudo-superhero over the years. In fact, since joining Twitter in 2015, Snowden has amassed more than 3.8 million followers. And while he’s a highly active Tweeter, he only follows one account in return: the NSA.

As a purveyor of truth and an advocate for more transparent privacy laws, Snowden has been an integral voice in the fight for freedom from overt and systemic government oppression. He’s chimed in on everything from the 2016 presidential election to the recent internet censorship happening Russia and more. He’s even schooled cable TV news pundits a time or two on the very meaning of surveillance.

Dear Joe,
With respect, that “reckless” approach led to the largest reform of unconstitutional domestic surveillance since 1978, and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service journalism. If that’s what recklessness looks like, we could use a hell of a lot more of it. https://t.co/QliTqo7o3h

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 4, 2018

In fact, it was Snowden’s work as a whistleblower that lead to both The Guardian and The Washington Post winning the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

He’s one of the strongest and most influential voices of reason in an age of countless government leaks and partisan whistleblowers; more than that, he’s one of the few prominent anti-government advocates who’s dedicated his life to working for the public (as stated in his Twitter bio).

So how has Snowden changed the world? Let’s take a look.

Snowden Signaled Sweeping Government Reforms

While the U.S. government (as well as governments abroad) had been spying on their citizens for decades, no one really knew how big or inclusive that system was. And while the Snowden leaks were certainly a tough pill to swallow, they gave the public a reason to force the government to undergo sweeping mass surveillance changes.

In 2015 the White House approved new reforms to limit the size and scope of their phone surveillance methods, and in the same year Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which drastically reduced the amount of data the NSA was able to collect.

While these were both steps in the right direction, it’s worth pointing out that some of that progress iscurrently being undone.

Snowden Promoted Greater Digital Awareness

As an enemy of the nation, Snowden has been in exile for more than five years, first taking refuge in Hong Kong and eventually seeking asylum in Russia. With public appearances few and far between, he does offer the occasional video conference. In one particularly eye-opening conference with The Intercept back in 2017, Snowden detailed how the NSA is currently using people’s appliances to spy on them. Here’s an excerpt:

“What they do is they wait for when these devices are being shipped to you, when you order them on Amazon or whatever. They go to them at the airports. They get the box. They use a little hair dryer to soften the adhesive. They open up the box. Then they put the USB stick in. They seal the box back all nice and perfect, and then they ship it on to you. And now your router, your computer, your TV is hacked. This is a very routine thing that happens, right?”

While Snowden may be issuing most of his statements via Twitter, he’s careful not to disclose too much information. In fact, he refuses to sign up for other social media sites and has stated time and again the importance of using an encrypted messaging service. When speaking on the issue of citizen surveillance, he’s quick to reframe the issue away from terrorism and instead towards manipulation. One of his more famous quotes puts the issue of government spying in a new light:

“These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.”

Though limited physically, Snowden’s never shies away from offering his expertise on the current state of affairs. Still warning the public of the dangers of mass surveillance, he recently went on the offense and blasted Facebook over the company’s handling of sensitive user data in one of his most powerful statements yet:

Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as “surveillance companies.” Their rebranding as “social media” is the most successful deception since the Department of War became the Department of Defense.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 17, 2018

Snowden Changed How the World Views Privacy

As one of the first public whistleblowers, Snowden received enormous backlash for his actions. Knowing he would immediately be chastised, brandished a traitor, and even jailed, he still followed his convictions.

“Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating. But there’s a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I’m no longer alone.”

It’s only years later that we can look back and see just how prophetic his warnings really were. With increased public scrutiny on data mining, social media scraping, and privacy swapping, it’s becoming clear how user data has become the ultimate weapon. And yet throughout all the noise, it was Edward Snowden who first warned us about the importance of keeping our digital lives private.

Check out VPNs to protect your privacy today.

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While President Trump warned during a Thursday press conference that a trade deal with China is far from guaranteed, it appears the White House might have won at least one concession during talks with Vice Premier Liu He Thursday afternoon.

Talking trade with the Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China, Liu He. pic.twitter.com/9T7Iq6F3Xe

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 17, 2018

Reuters is reporting that China has offered the US a trade-deficit reduction package amounting to roughly $200 billion annually.

China said to offer Trump a U.S. trade deficit reduction package approaching $200 billion annually – sources pic.twitter.com/tldxOfPDU9

— Reuters Business (@ReutersBiz) May 17, 2018

The dollar rose in a kneejerk reaction to the headline but its gains are fading fast.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates…

 

 

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